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RANKED: The most valuable brands in the world

Now the technology sector also has a strangle hold on another measure: the value of consumer brands.

The massive scale and reach of tech companies has helped their brand values to skyrocket over the last decade. In fact, even just adding Google and Apple's most recent numbers together gives a figure that rivals the GDP of Sweden.

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What is brand value, anyway?

This data on the most valuable brands comes from the BrandZ Top 100 Global Brands report for 2017, which uses a specific methodology to quantify the financial worth of different brands around the world.

In this case, by "brand", we are referring to the intangible asset that exists in the minds of consumers, which is usually an image forged over time through exposure to branding, ads, publicity, and other types of personal experiences.

Meanwhile, the "brand value" is the dollar amount a brand contributes to the overall value of a corporation. Measuring this intangible asset reveals an additional source of shareholder value that otherwise would not exist.

Diving deeper

What types of companies are building the strongest brands?

Here is the Top 100 list broken down by a few different key categories.

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Note: in these rankings we are counting both Amazon and Alibaba as tech companies

The amount of Chinese brands making the Top 100 is rising quickly - in 2008, only four made the list.

Today, there are 12 Chinese brands on the list, including widely-known names such as Huawei, Alibaba, and Ping An Insurance.

Other types of brands that do well in the rankings include financial services (23 of 100 brands) and technology (23 of 100 brands).

Brand value on the rise

Overall, the cumulative brand value of all 100 companies on the list has been rising. It now sits at $3.6 trillion in total.

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For comparison's sake - that's bigger than the annual GDP of Germany, the world's fourth largest economy.